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KEY VOTE "NO" ON CLOTURE FOR S. 1776

On behalf of hundreds of thousands of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to VOTE NO on cloture for S. 1776, the "Medicare Physician Fairness Act," and its appalling and dishonest attempt to mask the tremendous costs health care reform will impose upon American families and businesses. We will score this cloture vote when calculating our FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2009.Considering the enormity and complexity of our health care system, the American people deserve honesty and transparency in a reform debate. This kind of legislative scheming fails to live up to the high standards to which this Congress claims to aspire.

Introduced by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), S. 1776 would raise reimbursements for physicians through Medicare to the tune of $247 billion over 10 years. While this so-called "doc fix" has merit under the right circumstances as a means of preventing further erosion of physician participation in the Medicare program, this legislation contains no spending reductions elsewhere to offset its considerable cost. It would require that the Senate vote to waive its own budget rules, intended to protect taxpayers, and would represent a violation of "PAYGO" rules in the House as well. Perhaps more importantly, it serves as a deceptive measure to reduce the perceived cost of various plans for comprehensive health care overhaul.

Earlier this month, one such piece of legislation introduced by Finance Committee Chairman Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) received a 10-year cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office of $829 billion. It achieved a score more than $200 billion lower than the $1.042 trillion plan drafted by the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in part by reducing physician reimbursements through Medicare. By engineering a $247 billion reversal of part of the Baucus bill in separate legislation, it is clear that some leaders in Congress had no intent of allowing those reductions to take effect.

If Congress seeks a "doc fix," it should draft it into comprehensive health care reform legislation and allow it to be debated in proper context. Splitting higher reimbursements into a separate piece of legislation can only be an underhanded bait-and-switch attempt to deceive an American public that deserves better.

We will count your vote on cloture for S. 1776 as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2009. The Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the Jefferson Award, which recognizes members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.

In New Mexico, hundreds of high school students are walking out of class in protest of the new Common Core-aligned tests just implemented in the state. This is part of larger movement nationwide by parents and students to protest the standards, while without waiting for state legislatures to act.

Last Thursday the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to regulate broadband internet as a public utility. This decision to regulate the internet was made mostly through secret meetings without public comment and less than a decade after the FCC declined to regulate the internet because there was no necessity. Even worse, because the 300-plus page new rule has not been made public yet, we still do not know exactly what is in the rule. Since the Federal Trade Commission already has the authority to protect consumers from anticompetitive business practices, the FCC’s new rules are another example of government trying to fix a problem that is nonexistent. The new rules may in fact harm consumers both by limiting competition, and by preventing the FTC from filing charges against internet providers once they are determined to be common carriers.

The black community has been kept in bondage by the U.S. government, the speaker of an upcoming Black History Month event sponsored by the N.C. Republican Party’s 1st Congressional District, said. C.L. Bryant, a Baptist minister, is appearing at an event scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Friday at Deadwood restaurant near Williamston. Tickets are $15 and include a meal.

As one of our over 6.9 million FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and urge him or her to vote YES on the McClintock amendment to H.R. 749. This amendment would fully eliminate federal subsidies for Amtrak.

Last weekend, the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington, DC to address the most important issues in America. Everybody who attended was well aware that free markets in America have been under assault by the federal government’s crony relationships with private corporations.

One of the problems in the criminal justice system is the existence of mandatory minimum sentences. On the federal level, these are laws imposed by Congress that require judges to sentence a guilty offender to a minimum amount of time behind bars. This one-size-fits-all approach is flawed because it does not allow judges to exercise discretion based on the individual circumstances of the case.

The FCC’s recent decision to reclassify the internet as a utility is ruffling some feathers, but not the ones you might expect. The Federal Communications Commission, acting under orders from the president, has been largely successful in representing its decision as a matter of Net Neutrality, of regulating the specific ways in which service providers can manage bandwidth.